Dictation anxiety: The stenographer's stake in Dracula

I s Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897) as much about secretarial work as it is about sex? Written at the historical moment when women were first beginning to surge into the clerical workforce in Britain, the novel features a heroine, Mina Harker, who is very much a woman of her time: a budding secretary, one whose stenographic work on her "Traveler's Typewriter" proves crucial to the destruction of the infamous Count. As Jennifer Wicke has pointed out, Stoker's seemingly anachronistic Gothic tale in fact displays quite a fascination with the fin-de-siecle's own "vampiric" technologies of elusive, excessive, unnatural reproduction; not only typewriters but phonographs and Kodak cameras make key appearances in the text. Emphasizing these elements can help remind us of the dangers of applying the repressive hypothesis too hastily to Dracula—of assuming that the novel is "really" pointing to a repressed sexuality at every turn, rather than mobilizing discourses of the sexual in order to explain potentially even more outre technological phenomena. Yet what does this caveat mean for feminist readings of Stoker's text, which have tended to rely on its monstrous visions of female sexuality in order to understand its gender politics? The Count's singular threat, after all, consists in his ability to turn chaste